In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Pamir language family was sometimes referred to as the Ghalchah languages by western scholars.[5] The term Ghalchah is no longer used to refer to the Pamir languages or the native speakers of these languages.

Pamirian languages are also spoken in Xinjiang and the Pamir language Sarikoli is spoken beyond the Sarikol Range on the Afghanistan-China border and thus qualifies as the easternmost of the extant Iranian languages.

No features uniting the Pamir languages as a single subgroup of Iranian have been demonstrated.[6] The Ethnologue lists the Pamir languages along with Pashto as Southeastern Iranian,[7] however, according to Encyclopedia Iranica, the Pamirian languages and Pashto belong to the North-Eastern Iranian branch.[8]

A probable third, extinct language of the branch was Sarghulami, spoken in Afghanistan until the early 20th century. The only known record of the language is a wordlist elicited from a Munji informant in 1916.

The vast majority of Pamir speakers in Tajikistan and Afghanistan also use Tajik (Persian) as a literary language, which is—unlike the languages of the Pamir group—a Southwestern Iranian tongue. The language group is endangered, with the total number of speakers roughly around 100,000 in 1990.

^Antje Wendtland (2009), The position of the Pamir languages within East Iranian, Orientalia Suecana LVIII "The Pamir languages are a group of East Iranian languages which are linguistically quite diverse and
cannot be traced back to a common ancestor. The term Pamir languages is based on their geographical position rather than on their genetic closeness. Exclusive features by which the Pamir languages can be distinguished from all other East Iranian languages cannot be found either."

^Nicholas Sims-Williams, Eastern Iranian languages, in Encyclopaedia Iranica, Online Edition, 2010. "The Modern Eastern Iranian languages are even more numerous and varied. Most of them are classified as North-Eastern: Ossetic; Yaghnobi (which derives from a dialect closely related to Sogdian); the Shughni group (Shughni, Roshani, Khufi, Bartangi, Roshorvi, Sarikoli), with which Yazghulyami (Sokolova 1967) and the now extinct Wanji (J. Payne in Schmitt, p. 420) are closely linked; Ishkashmi, Sanglichi, and Zebaki; Wakhi; Munji and Yidgha; and Pashto."